By Mary Arnold
John Best talks with Rebecca Gerothanas, SVP/marketing/operations for Summit Credit Union, Madison, Wis.[/caption] Why is innovation so hard? "We want to do the 100 percent," meaning the new product can't be released until it does everything it could possibly do, explained John Best, founder of Best Innovation Group, Land o Lakes, Fla., in his CEO/Executive Team Network session, "Fostering Innovation: Starting a Startup Within Your Credit Union." "And if it fails, then we're loathe to try again." Instead of embarking on marathon development projects, Best suggested working in "small sprints." Think about the apps you use, he said. "Apps have little tiny changes all the time. Their developers ask, 'what can we do in x amount of time for the next release?'" They practice "continuous improvement and continuous delivery. How do we master that?" Best recommended these steps:
- Figure out what you are trying to do (what problem you want to solve, what service you want to offer).
- Make the innovation as lean as possible. Be ruthless about scope creep to create the "'minimum viable product' that can then be incrementally enhanced."
- Release it quickly.
- Measure results from the rollout.
- Build the "real thing" based on feedback.
To illustrate how this has worked in a credit union, Best talked about a service he helped develop at $2.7 billion Wescom Credit Union in 2013 that "allowed a member to take a picture of a credit card or card statement and do a balance transfer." What the CU was trying to do was get new loans. In fact, it tried the service first with car loans, but it failed, Best said, "because no one had copies of their auto loan statements and nobody cared" about refinancing car loans. So executives tried again with credit cards.
#CETNET attendees: Scan this with the conference app to earn game points.[/caption] When Wescom CU CEO Darren Williams, a CUES member, said he wanted the new offering done in 3 months, Best said OK, but Williams would need to come to every meeting to overrule add-ons to the idea and keep the work on track. "He (Williams) assigned [the job] to someone else who was much more ruthless. That's how we got it done," Best explained. In its initial release, the service was not very automated on the back end, but members did not see this. "It was like taking a lawn mower and driving it to work," Best said. Existing tools were not designed to do what the credit union wanted, "but we got it to work." Later, technology caught up and workarounds diminished. Best urged credit unions in his audience to try this in their own shops: "Turn ideas into products, measure how members respond, then decide whether to pivot or persevere."
Mary Arnold is CUES' VP/publications and social media. Listen to BIG Podcasts from 2014 Strategic Innovation Institute at MIT: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5. Also read, "Best Practices: Sprint Initiatives" from Credit Union Management magazine.
